Considering the Xenome thread has been very active in the past days, here's a MOTW thread for one of the earlier levels of EP2. I believe this is the map with the river (and the huge pit), so yeah it's pretty damn fun.

Also a note: next week there's going to be another one of those general discussion threads, however accustomed for a singular topic.

UBerserker wrote:Considering the Xenome thread has been very active in the past days, here's a MOTW thread for one of the earlier levels of EP2. I believe this is the map with the river (and the huge pit), so yeah it's pretty damn fun.

Yeah, it's certainly a lot of fun but OMG this was hard on my first playthrough (on Medium I think) .It a large maps with 5 or 6 completely different kinds of areas. There are 4 screenshots showing 4 different type areas, but there is still the lower large cave section, and the outside river section (one of the hardest).This must be one of the maps with th greatest variation in locations.

It's damn hard and on first playthrough it was my killing fields insofar that I doubted I would ever be able to beat the map on Hard, let alone on Unreal.BUT. There is always a way (not necessarily obvious) to use the surroundings to your advantage. The whole section going down from the frozen Skaarj area to the final river is lethal but for talented players (which I am not) and yet I eventually managed to pass that area (quite long) without loss of health (certainly not much).

I sort of went with the flow on this one. I remember having ‘map makers block’ where the waterfall is situated. Initially the player was going to swim through the water into a cavern like system only to end up on the river, but then where would the Skaarj have come from?

I ended up having a small base which would explain their presence. At the same time the Nali’s natural portal was interfering with their technology, that’s why the player can’t use it.

Using the Nali portal was easier to explain when in situ of the next level being Human. I also wanted the Nali to have some kind of role rather than being cannon fodder for the Skaarj.

A good "journey" level that covers a wide variety a themes in a way that's mostly smooth and mixes in plenty of little moments on the way (like the frozen Skaarj and huge waterfall cave). I guess it's also the last level on the planet of the first Xenome before moving somewhere completely different. The Skaarj base at the end being only slightly downriver from the ancient portal causing interference seems slightly unconvincing, but I guess it wasn't properly active until the Nali got there; I'm not surprised that there were some mapper-block type problems around that part.